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Cut The Cable Cord January 1, 2016

Back in 2009 my husband was laid-off for about 6 months and the first thing that we did was cut our cable off. It was just not a needed thing and the bill was too much to have to worry about when his pay was a LOT less then it had been. We would rather have food to eat than be able to watch cable. The first thing we did was get the ole VCR and DVD player out and then we found a cheap antenna for our TV so that we could watch local channels. It wasn’t too long after that that they switched everything to digital so I got one of those certificates that the government was sending out to be able to get a converter box. We ended up finding a much better Ultra Thin Indoor HDTV Antenna, 50 Mile Range that made us go from having about 5 local channels to now having 12. Better than nothing.

The following year I started investigating ways to be able to watch movies and such at home through the internet and found out about a Roku Streaming Media Player so that we could use Netflix. In that May of 2010 they had a Mother’s day special going on and I got one for maybe 70.00 dollars and had free shipping . Plus it timed to be a birthday gift for me also. We loved it right away. Could watch Netflix with it and it was only $7.99 a month bill. Plus Roku Streaming Media Player had a lot of other free channels on it to be able to watch other things. I have since upgraded my “ancient” 1st gen ROKU to a Roku 2 Streaming Media Player. To make it better for our older TV that I had gotten at a thrift store, I bought a Mini Composite RCA CVBS AV To HDMI Converter which made some of the channels work better and be able to play on our old TV. I love my ROKU. It was the best purchase we ever made. Has saved us so much money. I would never go back to cable.

Still, we have no bills each month for cable. NETFLIX and our internet is the only bill. But we would have the internet anyway because of work and schooling.

Now it is 2015 and we have really gotten good at being able to watch anything we want to watch online and thru the ROKU, but I wanted something different and something that would take what I do on our tablets and computer to our TV. So I did some more research and found out about an Android TV media streaming box. I found this one, MXQ Android 4.4 Quad-Core WiFi Kodi 1080P Smart set TV Box 8GB XBMC Fully Loaded on ebay for low price , It was on sale on Black Friday. It is basically like an android tablet, but you have it on your TV! I have had it for a week and other than the cost of the box, I have not had to spend any other money. We love it.

On Christmas eve we received a free 2 months of Slingtv. So, until February we have those channels. But, we will cancel it. We still just have Netflix. Have had it so long that they grandfathered us in on the old price of $7.99, but , I think it will go up sometime this year. But, even 8.99 a month is a lot less then a huge cable bill. When our cable was cut off we had basic and in 2 rooms. It was 89.00 a month!!! Can’t even imagine what it would be now. They say at our house now we can’;t even get cable hooked up tho, too far from the new lines that TWC put in. Just easier to keep the cable cord cut!!!

There are so many ways to be able to cut the cord and save a ton of money. Frees up a lot of money for you to then be able to prep more.

Now , you can even get a Rabbit TV that is full of ways to watch TV and movies. Pretty easy to use. I used to use it on my laptop until my laptop quit. But this is low-cost and a very frugal way to help you cut the cord

Having to update this post – I completely forgot about my son’s AppleTV that he LOVES! He is 22 and has never complained about not having cable. The AppleTV works with his phone and all of his other Apple products and has Netflix etc on it. We got that for free when we signed up for faster internet and they gave us a $100.00 Apple gift certificate. Pretty cool.